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Time delay

Twentieth Century FoxHenry Fonda, right, starred in the 1940 film "The Grapes of Wrath," derived from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by John Steinbeck. The movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won two.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. --- Motion pictures, typically, do not have big shoulders. In fact, if they could be personified most of them would have stooped shoulders, weak chins and bad eyesight -- definitely bad eyesight.

Asking movies, therefore, to serve as some sort of representation of where we are as a culture, a society, at the moment of their release into the world is generally asking a bit much.

A year often elapses from the time a movie was shot and its release date, often more. Add to that the amount of time that's passed since the idea for the film first originated in screenplay form, and the movie that results isn't so much a window on our time as it is the one that existed two, five, even 10 years ago, sometimes more.

This is not particularly useful for anyone engaged in cultural punditry. And yet, engage they do, since that's what they're paid to do, and movies that were not remotely inspired by the tenor of our times are shoehorned to represent them, somehow. As with everything, sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.

This is not particularly useful for anyone engaged in cultural punditry. And yet, engage they do, since that's what they're paid to do, and movies that were not remotely inspired by the tenor of our times are shoehorned to represent them, somehow. As with everything, sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.

Turning our attention to two movies opening this week, the makers of the loathsome "Confessions of a Shopaholic" are quick to point out that its central character, played by Isla Fisher, has problems with credit-card debt. This is so, but the movie is so drenched in conspicuous consumption -- it's its central character's sole reason for living -- that the entire enterprise isn't just less than timely, but borderline offensive.

But then there's the Clive Owen-Naomi Watts thriller "The International," which has chosen as its big, bad villain a multinational investment bank that's up to its eyeballs in corruption. Good choice!

Motion pictures are often behind the curve when it comes to bad guys -- depicting communists as evil after the end of the Cold War, for instance -- but "The International" has the good fortune of being eerily prescient in this regard.

Will there be movies made about the Great Recession? Maybe not, specifically, but the subject is bound to show up in motion pictures one way or another.

We recently watched the 1935 Katharine Hepburn movie "Alice Adams," in which the star played a strictly middle-class young woman being courted by a wealthy businessman played by Fred MacMurray (looking all of 14 years old). The class consciousness in the film is striking, as is the fact that the movie came out when the Great Depression was still raging. (That definitive Depression film "The Grapes of Wrath" didn't hit theaters until 1940, because first John Steinbeck had to write the novel from which it was derived.)

It simply takes so long to get movies made these days that any timeliness they may possess is more likely than not to be an accident.

The next time we have time to blog we'll recount the exasperatingly long day we spent today with the actor Joaquin Phoenix, in one of the most bizarre professional experiences we've ever had. Look for it!